3 The 1850s and 1860s
3.3 Pastoralists and agriculturalists
In its 'Plan of Assisted Emigration and Land-Settlement' the Natal Land and Colonisation Company (NLCC), a land company that came into existence when some of the largest
landowners of the colony decided to pool their assets,69 listed a number of the most important agricultural products of the colony. This list included: sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton,
arrowroot, wheat, Indian corn, kafir corn, oats, barley, beans, buckwheat, potatoes and sweet potatoes. Just after that list was added that the colony also exported 1,465,000 lbs. of wool in
1864. The livestock at the end of that year numbered more than 600,000.70 This shows that farming in Natal was a very varied activity: there were tropical plantation crops, temperate agricultural crops and pastoral products. The types of farming can be linked to the different regions of Natal. In the coastal lowlands tropical plantation agriculture was the norm. Sugar was the most successful tropical crop. The Midlands were characterised by maize, dairy farming and extensive grazing and in the northern districts the keeping of sheep and cattle was the dominant activity.71 In its settlement-plan the NLCC suggested mixed farming in the Midlands." The company substantiated this with the example of a 'thrifty and industrious settler' near Pietermaritzburg with a small mixed farm and £500 to invest. After this investment he managed to earn £285 back in the first year with only £48 of expenses.73
It was of course not because the settler population wanted Natal to be a colony of white settlement that things also turned out this way. Africans heavily outnumbered the European population and despite the fact that this minority owned the vast majority of the land (and certainly of the good land) it only effectively worked a small portion of it. The truth was that Africans produced a very substantial amount of food and that the European farmers could often not compete with them. The problem of the quasi-monopolisation of the land by Europeans could be sidestepped due to the fact that much of this land was in the hands of people who were not working it.7 Most of these absentee landowners did not mind Africans living on their land and most even saw a nice opportunity in it to earn money from their land by charging hut rents.75 Living on Crown Lands was usually also a viable option, even though most of that land was not of the best quality. This large concentration of land in the hands of absentee landowners was a result of the liberal land policies of the republic and later the British, combined with the exodus of about half the Boers and the failure of most settlement schemes, which resulted in even more land up for grabs.7 The crisis of the mid-1860s too brought more land in fewer hands due to the bankruptcy of many farmers.77 By far the most important and controversial of these land-speculators was the NLCC.7
Having the opportunity to squat on land of absentee landlords and to sell surpluses, as many Europeans were dependent on this peasantry for agricultural produce and as several locations were in walking distance of one of the main towns, these small-scale agriculturalists tended to be rather competitive.79 Especially in staple crops the settlers were no match for the black peasantry for much of the nineteenth century. Some reasons for this were the low consumption needs, the use of family labour and better local knowledge. On the other hand many of the immigrants were completely unfamiliar with the land, were often not even farmers and had little or no capital. ' By the turn of the century the peasant surplus, however, turned into a deficit, something that had at least as much to do with government intervention as with market forces.82
The Boer pastoral economy in the Northern districts was predominantly based on the keeping of cattle. This changed however with the lungsickness plague of 1855, which 'cured' the farmers from their cattle obsession: 'Formerly the enormous herds paralysed their efforts, and threw them into a comas [sic] of inactivity, if not something worse. The lung sickness has, however, waked them up somewhat, and the result is that sheep are filling the vacancy that has occurred.'83 In 1858 the first wool fair was held in Pietermaritzburg and in the same year the 'Natal Association for the Introduction of Woolled Sheep' and the 'Natal Wool
Gathering Company' were called into being.84 Wool quickly became Natal's main export commodity, which it would remain until 1914.85 The export of wool was worth £120,778 in
1870, or more than thirty per cent of the total export; seven years later wool earned sixty per cent of all foreign currency.86
Agriculture in the Midlands was predominantly based on maize production, mostly on mixed farms, combined with dairy farming and on the less good lands extensive grazing. A lot of the production of food crops remained the business of the African peasantry. The closer to the cities, which were of course the markets, the more valuable the lands were and the more intensive the agriculture was. In 1862 a farm of 871 acres, four miles from Pietermaritzburg, was publicised at £3 per acre. Lots - 'suitable for Market Gardens and Pineries, and Cows kept for the supply of milk to D'Urban'90 - in the projected village of Clairmont, at a stone's throw from Durban, were publicised at £30 in 1852, despite the fact that they were only just over one acre.91 These prices were very high when compared to the prices for Crown Lands, which under the imperial system were sold by auction at upset prices of 4s. per acre.92
It was however neither wool nor food crops that captured the imagination of the people; it was sugar that nobody could stop talking about. The newspapers were full of reports of how well sugar cultivators were doing and how big the sugar industry could become in the future.93 Particularly Edmund Morewood was very active in promoting sugar as a viable plantation crop for the coastal areas of Natal.94 Su gar was one of the most important tropical commodities in the nineteenth century and the consumption of it in the UK rose from nineteen pound per person per year in 1830 to more than seventy pounds in 1890.95 The export of sugar rose quickly, but it would remain the second currency earner after wool. The export of sugar was worth more than £76,000 in 1865. 6 This was despite a dip in sugar prices in the mid-
18608. 7 The capital-intensive nature of plantation farming9 combined with the reluctance of banks to provide capital for sugar cultivation 9 made the role of the merchant elite in this enterprise important.100 The Natal Mercury noted that they had the 'high satisfaction of making public the [illegible word] steps taken by a numerous body of most respectable inhabitants of Durban, for prosecuting this vital enterprise in the immediate vicinity of the port.' A class of urban merchant-planters came to dominate the sugar industry in Natal.
Sugar cultivation was however not only a much discussed subject due to its success, but also due to its labour needs, always a hot issue in nineteenth century South Africa.
Finding enough labourers was not necessarily the problem as sugar plantations mainly needed
a lot of labour outside the fieldwork season of the Zulus. Finding people who were willing to work before sunrise and after sunset was more problematic.'02 Sugar cane has to be processed as soon as possible after the harvesting otherwise the quality would suffer.' Therefore the mills should work as much of the day as possible during harvest time, but Zulu beliefs did not allow them to leave the house when it was still dark outside. This belief combined with the fact that harvest time for sugar cane is in winter severely limited the time the mills could operate.104 The problem, in other words, was not just to find labour, but also to have the Africans accept the industrial time the millers wanted to introduce. And since a lot of the plantation owners also had urban businesses, they did not want the plantations to compete for their urban labour either, or vice-versa. The government in its turn did not want to increase the pressure on the African population by forcing them to provide too much labour, in order to keep the peace. Therefore both government and the class of merchant-planters rallied in favour of imported labour,' an idea that was launched as early as 1855.
Not only the plantations and the cities needed labour of course, settler farms needed the services of the Africans too. Working on white owned farms was however one of the least popular options to chose from, as the wages were low and the work hard and lonely.1 7 As long as the Africans had other options, settler farmers found it very hard to find labourers.108
The continued survival of African pastoralists and peasantry did not only mean labour shortage for the commercial farmers but also competition.109 The discontent of the settlers with this state of affairs was expressed in the 1852-1853 Natal Native Affairs Commission, which was a counterweight for the more liberal 1847 Locations Commission. This new commission proposed measures to underdevelop the peasantry and thus represented a fundamentally different idea on how to extract surplus from the African population, directly through labour instead of through rents and marketing its produce. In practice however the peasantry continued to produce surpluses until at least the last decade of the nineteenth century. *'